Sam says:

I loved school. So much so I didn’t miss a single day of high school (something my Top Trump-style business cards proudly boasts).

I was a swot and a keen one at that.

And some things never change.

Cast your mind back to those first few days of the new school year when the teachers handed out brand new exercise books for every subject.

It’s something I haven’t quite managed to shake off and to this day I use separate notebooks for each of my clients.

Why? Well, I’m not quite sure, but there is something very satisfactory knowing exactly where every scrap of information relating to each client is kept.

Right John?

John says:

Hold on…. Let me climb out from underneath this sputtering mound of scrap paper, coffee cups and post-it notes. What did you say?

Sam is super-organised, and I envy her the regimented way she keeps things – her life, her admin, her all sorts… she’s just good. Her notebook thing is something I aspire to. I have many different notebooks. I use them at different times. Some upside down – some are started halfway through.

I don’t so much have a system, I have more of a … well a thing. A chaotic thing. A Mandelbrot filing system. If I need to find something it becomes an adventure. I find clues which help me narrow down the probabilities of where, whatever I am looking for might actually be.

It works for me. I’ve tried to be organised. I once spent a week creating a system for managing my work. It was perfect, it had loads of acronyms, there was a folder for everything, a sub file… a place for everything I could ever possibly think I might need. I used it for about a day and then forgot about it.  It was a phenomenal waste of time. I could used that time to much better effect, such as learning Serbo-Croat… or something.

Anyway, didn’t Einstein once say that people with tidy desks and ordered minds were potential serial killers? I’m sure he said something like that. If I’m not here next week – you know why.